The Lead

Perkins+Will is this year’s winner of the “Best Architecture Firm – Large” award as part of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)’s first annual Best in Building Awards. The Best in Building Awards celebrate the year’s best products, projects, organizations and individuals making an impact in “green” building.

FREE Email Newsletter

The 2015 Laboratory Design Conference is open for registration. Your opportunity to learn, network and participate in discussions about current and future trends in lab design is coming to Atlanta, April 27-29th. The countdown to the conference has begun, and here’s a countdown of reasons why you should be there.

A proposed framework for an alternative, integrated path to becoming an architect, which could culminate in students earning their architectural license at graduation, has drawn interest from more than 30 institutions that offer accredited architectural degree programs, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) announced.

The Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) and Skanska announced a new U.S. partnership. With the partnership, Skanska has committed to aligning the delivery of heavy infrastructure civil projects with efforts to ensure the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the communities where they are built.

The new $82 million instructional science facility at Univ. of Wisconsin-La Crosse will be designed by a collaboration of national architecture and engineering firm SmithGroupJJR in association with local partner River Architects. This project will provide a complete replacement of Cowley Hall, the current UW-La Crosse science instruction facility built in 1965.

In its 49th year, the Laboratory of the Year Awards continue to recognize excellence in research laboratory design, planning and construction. Judging for this year’s competition took place on Thursday, February 19th and was conducted by a blue-ribbon panel of laboratory architects, engineers, equipment manufacturers, researchers and the editors of R&D Magazine and Laboratory Design Newsletter.

EYP announced Leslie Sims recently joined the firm as a Science Expert, supporting EYP’s nationally recognized higher education, government and corporate sectors. For more than 30 years, she has been a widely acknowledged leader in innovative architecture for science, engineering and technology, and is nationally recognized for the management, planning and design of a wide variety of lab spaces.

Arup, a multidisciplinary engineering and consulting firm, announced Carl Crow, PE, ASHRAE HBDP, has joined the firm in its Houston location as an associate principal mechanical engineer with a focus on healthcare and research facilities. Crow will be responsible for leading and growing the healthcare/health science design capabilities in the firm’s Houston office.

Treanor Architects is pleased to announce the hiring of Patrick Jones to the firm’s S&T team. With 15 years of experience in architecture, and a specialized focus on science and lab facilities, Jones adds depth to the firm’s capabilities.

Working with an ambitious timeline of just under one year, Perkins+Will has reinvented two facilities as new pharmacology labs for Long Island Univ. Located on the top floor of a three-story building in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., the 6,000-sf labs expands Long Island Univ.’s position in the area of graduate education and research by creating an advanced analytical lab.

Toronto’s Forensic Services and Coroner’s Complex (FSCC) has received an Award of Merit from the 2014 American Institute of Architects Justice Facility Review. Stantec Architecture, in association with MWL Architects, served as the Proponent Design Architects and Architects of Record on the project.

Inadequate insulation is one of the largest causes of wasted energy, quickly allowing comfortable heating or cooling to disperse air outside. That’s why researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating with industry to develop a high-performance material that nearly doubles the performance of traditional insulators without a high cost premium.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced a legislative agenda for the 114th Congress that sets a path for increasing construction activity, creating jobs, preserving the nation’s heritage and ensuring that new generations of architects design a resilient future for America.

There were 10 out of 12 months of increasing demand for design services in 2014, and the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) points to a healthy outlook for the nonresidential construction industry. As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the ABI reflects the approximate nine to 12 month lead time between architecture billings and construction spending.

Windows allow brilliant natural light to stream into homes and buildings. Along with light comes heat that, in warm weather, we often counter with energy-consuming air conditioning. Now scientists are developing a new kind of "smart window" that can block out heat when the outside temperatures rise. The advance could one day help consumers better conserve energy on hot days and reduce electric bills.

Georgia Tech’s Engineered Biosystems Building will provide 218,880 sf of flexible interdisciplinary lab space for researchers collaborating in the fields of chemical biology, cell therapies and systems biology. A principle goal of the design is to foster interaction between chemists, engineers, biologists and computational scientists from two separate colleges: the College of Engineering and the College of Science.